Was I the only one to ever hit that bug where on some missions you randomly found so much Elerium-115 so that you no longer had to worry about depleting it as a resource? That made the game suddenly lot easier to finish.
Also, disagree that the "Terror from the Deep" was poor. It was more of the good stuff and much much harder.
Clearing Cookies is definitely a good start. Cookies take essentially no effort on the trackers' part, so they are deployed a lot.
I personally usually just recommend installing the EFF's Privacy Badger [0], which eats Cookies and blocks tracking scripts all in one, while almost never breaking webpages, so while it's not perfect protection, it's a good compromise for most people.
Yes, that's naive, though depends on what you mean by spying. Generally speaking though, if you remove a method or source of spying that's of value, someone will find a way to get the information anyway if it's possible.
building whole cities and landscapes by putting together small bricks piece by piece? would be surprised if they were not all over it in DK, the land of lego.
Same here, stopped watching around 1998. I though it's mostly about the car (which is largely random per-season, yes) and instead of celebrating the design/engineering behind the only things celebrated around f1 are the personalities of drivers, their excesses and their egos.
the only things celebrated around f1 are the personalities of drivers
I don't think that's quite true. Quite a lot gets said about at least a couple of designers, most especially Adrian Newey (all agree that Vettel is an amazing driver, but also that the recent RB cars that Newey has designed are dominant). We hear a lot from team principals like Horner, Brawn, Kaltenborn (first female in this role!). And race engineers like Rob Smedley and Rocky Rocquelin get their voice heard as well.
I think Facebook is not after FB Purity. They are after anyone who could come up with a plugin that scrapes the content and stores it to a db. People using the plugin would get access to the db in exchange: companies could look up prospective employees, ex-girlfriends spy on their defriended ex-boyfriends, etc.
Hell, the idea is so tempting that someone is definitely doing this already. And you'd only need a percentile of the users to get the information for every other facebook user.
Surely this can be said of any application that you give such permissions to with OAauth? We've already seen cases of people selling the information they gathered.
can someone explain to me how you can make money on a game like Rochard (one of the games in the bundle)? There is such an incredible amount of detail in the background in each scene, it looks like few thousand hours of work just that.
Most of the games business is a high risk, high reward gamble. New IP much more so than working with an existing franchise. This is in no way unique to a game like Rochard, it'd apply equally much to $0.99 iPhone games or AAA games launching on all platforms and needing to sell 3 million copies to break even.
In this case the original target market was the PS3 store, and my understanding is that the very highest selling indie games there have lifetime sales in the half million unit range. And the sales figures are likely obeying a power law, with the median sales in the thousands of units. It does seem like a pretty horrible place to be selling to.
For Rochard, we can try to make a rough estimate of the cost. First of all the studio making the game was formed for an overly ambitious project (Earth No More), which was scrapped after several years. Mostof the team dispersed, but a skeleton crew started on a new game, and shipped Rochard around 1.5 years laters. The credits show 15 people, but I doubt they would all have been on the project full time. So let's guess 10-15 man-years of work.
On the funding side, clearly they won't have had much if any money left at the start of the project. Early on they sold some part of the rights to the game to an outside investor for 400kEUR.
Even if we ignore overhead, the cost of things like voice acting, and assume Finnish pay levels, it seems clear that the team wasn't working for full market salaries. Maybe they just really wanted to work on games rather than CRUD apps. Or they all had significant equity, and were hoping to hitting it big with that 1% surprise hit.
Judging by Rochard not appearing on the top 20 most sold lists on the PSN, it seems like a fair bet that it did not make a profit there. I don't know whether it flopped completely or had mediocre sales. For the purpose of making money, it doesn't really matter. There's a good chance that they'll make more from the Humble Bundle than from PSN. Even so, it doesn't look like a project that would have broken even for the investors, or for anyone working on it at below market wage.
(Edit: Which is a shame. It was one of my favorite games last year, and I certainly didn't mind paying for it again as part of the bundle).
Dustforce dev here. We (4 people) just lived super cheaply in a shed and apartment, working day and night for a year and a half. Expenses were about $25k per person per year (pretty much just food, rent/utilities, beer). Lived off of savings and prize money from a prototype of the game.
A lot of those backgrounds look procedurally generated or tiled in some way. They're still wonderfully crafted - just not necessarily hand-modeled or hand-painted down to the pixel.
Your assumption there is no law against piracy in Russia is false.
Russia is not a great idea, our gov took torrents.ru domain away without any trial as well. They are not so active as in USA, but since Russia is on the way to WTO, btjunkie wouldve been closed rather fast if it would be demanded.
they shouldn't be sorry. Developers actively avoided the plugins site for the last few years, as it was nearly useless for finding up-to-date, quality tested and mantained plugins.
There were usually multiple plugins (of varying quality) sharing the same name, most outdated, no documentation, sometimes no link to a source repo. It was hard to navigate and slow to search. I work with 6 other front-end devs, none used it.
Not to mention that the JQ people apparently decided to leave plugin comments as absolutely undifferentiated blocks of text concatenated without the benefit of CSS. In fact, just this one fact has led me to a belief that JQ people are not actually interested in usability. A lot of people talkin', but nobody knows what's going on.
Also, disagree that the "Terror from the Deep" was poor. It was more of the good stuff and much much harder.